Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage Read Online Free PDF

man whom I adored. I vowed to him--drilling the words into his ear so he would grasp my earnestness--that I would not leave him, that I would do whatever it took to fix things, and that even if things could not somehow be fixed in America, we would always stay together anyhow, somewhere, wherever in the world that had to be.
    Officer Tom came back into the room.
    At the last instant, Felipe whispered to me, "I love you so much, I will even marry you."
    "And I love you so much," I promised, "that I will even marry you."
    Then the nice Homeland Security people separated us and handcuffed Felipe and led him away--first to jail and then off to exile .

    As I flew home alone that night to our now-obsolete little existence in Philadelphia, I considered more soberly what I had just promised. I was surprised to find that I was not feeling weepy or panicky; somehow the situation seemed too grave for any of that. What I felt, instead, was a ferocious sense of focus--a sense that this situation must be addressed with the utmost seriousness. In the space of only a few hours, my life with Felipe had been neatly flipped upside down, as though by some great cosmic spatula. And now, it seemed, we were engaged to be married. This had certainly been a strange and rushed engagement ceremony. It felt more like something out of Kafka than out of Austen. Yet the engagement was nonetheless official because it needed to be.
    Fine, then. So be it. I would certainly not be the first woman in my family's history who ever had to get married because of a serious situation--although my situation, at least, did not involve accidental pregnancy. Still, the prescription was the same: Tie the knot, and do it quickly. So that's what we would do. But here was the real problem, which I identified that night all alone on the plane back home to Philadelphia: I had no idea what marriage was .
    I had already made this mistake--entering into marriage without understanding anything whatsoever about the institution--once before in my life. In fact, I had jumped into my first marriage, at the totally unfinished age of twenty-five, much the same way that a Labrador jumps into a swimming pool--with exactly that much preparation and foresight. Back when I was twenty-five, I was so irresponsible that I probably should not have been allowed to choose my own toothpaste, much less my own future, and so this carelessness, as you can imagine, came at a dear cost. I reaped the consequences in spades, six years later, in the grim setting of a divorce court.
    Looking back on the occasion of my first wedding day, I'm reminded of Richard Aldington's novel Death of a Hero , in which he ponders his two young lovers on their ill-fated wedding day: "Can one tabulate the ignorances, the relevant ignorances, of George Augustus and Isabel when they pledged themselves together until death do us part?" I, too, was once a giddy young bride very much like Aldington's Isabel, about whom he wrote: "What she didn't know included almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she did know."
    Now, though--at the considerably less giddy age of thirty-seven--I was not convinced that I knew very much more than ever about the realities of institutionalized companionship. I had failed at marriage and thus I was terrified of marriage, but I'm not sure this made me an expert on marriage; this only made me an expert on failure and terror, and those particular fields are already crowded with experts. Yet destiny had intervened and was demanding marriage from me, and I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitations for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity .
    So it slowly